The Evolutionary Logic of the Catholic ‘Meme’
Question Nine: (Quoting me) “The scientific method has nothing to say about bad and good. It only talks about mass, duration, length, candlepower, current, temperature, moles of substance.”
You’re right. Bad and good are useful concepts in a discussion about morality, but they don’t empirically exists like heat or duration. I do think, though that there are understandable laws that govern the interactions between self-replicating agents, and most of what we call bad and good does empirically exist in game theory and evolutionary psychology.
Is a monk avowed to abstinence a self-replicating agent? Is a soldier who throws himself on a hand-grenade for his squad mates not related to him by blood a self-replicating agent? If not, are monks and soldiers not covered under the understandable laws governing moral action?
Is game theory a real object with mass, duration, length, candlepower, current, temperature and substance, or is it an abstraction about artificial situations of action where the goal of action is a given, that is, assumed as an axiom?
No game theory operates on the assumption that some players do not care if they win or lose. So clearly game theory presupposes something that cannot be confirmed or denied by any empirical test, namely, it accepts the existence of a final cause as a given.
But final causes are non-empirical by definition. The number of babies born to a pregnant woman can be counted, because that number is an empirical fact. The desirability or goodness of pregnancy cannot be counted, because that is an abstraction, an idea, a mental or moral reality, a spiritual fact.
Is evolutionary psychology concerned with anything but the survival of the fittest and the progeny of the most fertile?
Your faith that the laws governing evolutionary psychology is touching, but at the moment, since the laws you propose may exist have not been proven to exist, your statement that they do exist is a supposition. It is not even a theory, since I cannot subject your statement to an experiment or empirical test to confirm it to myself.
But if you take it on faith that one day science will deduce laws of right and wrong from the game theory of evolutionary psychology, at least we now we have a common ground.
You must convert to the Roman Catholic Church.
If rightness consists of nothing other than what lends itself to the survival and fertility of the fittest, and wrongness consists of nothing but feebleness and sterility, it should be clear that any institution forbidding divorce, contraception, and abortion of necessity is more fertile in a Darwinian sense than any institution that does not. The Roman Catholic Church is the only such institution in history with a proven record of maintain her rules across centuries.
Moreover, the truth or falsehood of the Catholic claims need not concern us, since you did not say right and wrong were related to true and false, only to evolutionary fertility and infertility.
Also, it is clear that a belief in the afterlife makes soldiers more willing to fight and die, since they can be lured by the promise of eternal reward (and we need not care if those promises are true or false according to your standard, right?)
Also, the Roman Catholic Church by preserving traditions since the Fifth Century, and preserving certain Jewish traditions since the Bronze Age, not only is the clear evolutionary survivor in terms of genes, but also in terms of ‘memes’ that intellectual analogy of self replicating molecules in the realm of ideas. The Church imposes a positive obligation to proselytize to the unbelievers and to educate the young, so much so that all the major institutions of learning in the West are either founded as Catholic Institutions or as denominations breaking off from the Catholic. We also preserved the learning and lore of the ancient world (despite historical revisionism to the contrary assigning this role to the Mohammedans.)
The existence of other denominations, like Lutheranism, or heresies like Mohammedanism, is a sign of the success rather than the failure of the Catholic ‘meme’ since these denomination are nothing more than mutations are partial versions or variations of the mother ‘meme’. The information that is being passed along still had its origins in Catholic thought, and so therefore, by your moral code, that is a success.
However, by the evolutionary logic of game theory, Protestantism must either be illogical (as a matter of historical fact illogical memes are more vulnerable to criticism and hence harder to explain and pass along) or it must adhere to a standard giving every individual a right to select his believes according to his own conscience. Whatever the right or wrong of this stance, it is simply a logical inevitability to conclude that an institution which holds as a doctrine its one inability to pass along its own doctrines is less able to pass along its ‘meme’ than one (like the Catholic Church) which does not.
Again, evolution dictates not merely that children be born, but also reared and educated so that the children will prosper in turn. Hence sexual promiscuity and fathering many bastards may at first seem a valid evolutionary strategy, but a cursory glance at history will reveal the poverty and backwardness of civilizations practicing polygamy – it is strictly a Third World habit.
Serial polygamy, divorce and remarriage, suffer many of the same drawbacks when it comes to providing for a stable home in which to made the self replicating units known as children as efficient as possible for reaching their own self replication age and defeating all rivals and competitors. Catholics are not Amish; pacifism is not part of our evolutionary strategy. Indeed, we are kind to the weak and downtrodden precisely because this helps our evolutionary strategy of spreading our numbers among the poor.
By your statement, your moral code should condemn homosexuality, sex outside wedlock, divorce, abortion, and contraception. Your moral code must embrace a belief in the afterlife merely to make soldiers less risk-averse, whether that belief is supported by evidence or not.
Your moral code glorifies long lived institutions, since they are the success stories in the game theory game of ‘memes’ and condemns living outside an institution. The Catholic Church is the oldest institution in history, older than your alphabet or mine, and far older than your government.
She is older than the zero.
Right now, you personally, lack any institutional superstructure. No one is helping you pass your ideas on to the next generation. Hence, you have almost no chance of passing your thoughts and ideas, your so-called memes, onto your greatgrandchildren, whereas my Church will be flourishing for another two thousand years.
Your moral code requires you to be Catholic. Welcome aboard!
If you are not Catholic, if indeed you recoil at the idea, ask yourself why? Why do you not really, deep-down, believe your moral code of a game theory interpretation of evolutionary psychology as the basis for right and wrong?